I am a violinist/composer working on extended technique Subharmonics and interactive computer systems, sometime with robots, and most recently, with sensors. I aim to document my activities as much as possible, since I maybe leading quite a different career path than other classically trained violinists.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Day19: friend, inspiration, and modern art

I think I had a bit too much intake of sensory information yesterday; I got quite tired to do a blog, so went to bed early while watching a movie. Husband went to Picardie to play Flamenco guitar in son's French 1st grader's class. He is on 'leave' from work until July 6th back in NYC, so making the most of his time spending with kids. Then it will be just me and the grandparents!

A friend of mine, Ken Perlin, a renowned computer graphics and animation prof. at NYU has been in Paris for a conference so he came over to speak with us at IRCAM. Frédéric and Bruno gave him some demos and we had a very informative and inspired conversation. Visual and auditory gesture of course have a lot in common. Then we went to a vegan restaurant called Le Potager du Marais with him. I always thought Paris must be difficult to live for a vegetarian but we are surprised how many vegetarian restaurants are now in Paris. This was a good one! I had a Tarte Tatin with Almond cream, non-diary and gluten free. How about that, in Paris.

Then Ken proposed to go to Pompidou Centre which I hadn't been (!) since I got here, where I could get in for free with a guest as I discovered. There was a exhibition called Deamland "City of the future". The art in there felt a bit naïve, or almost artificially 'forced' and not born. I don't know how else to describe it.

Then there was another exhibition called elles@centrepompidou, which said "For the first time in the world, a museum will be displaying the feminine side of its own collections. This new presentation of the Centre Pompidou's collections will be entirely given over to the women artists from the 20th century to the present day." Okay. Does that mean if you are a woman you really don't deserve to be featured alongside male artists? :) Not meant to be cynical, but then female artists should be enormously grateful for this show of attention to our gender. The collection, quite sexually explicit on purpose at times without the element of wonder of beauty, or so I found, was also feeling 'forced'. As a 'female' artist in computer music and composition, I do get asked the question of how it is to be a woman in the field. My answer, or the answer that comes to mind before I answer, is always, "Oh well, I didn't think about that until you asked". It is probably a bit naïve but I would rather not make a career out of being a woman artist myself. But then, that's just me.